Category: Mobile

This category features articles on best and emerging practices for responsive website design, Web apps and native apps. While the mobile Web is still in it’s infancy, we can learn from the experiences of professionals who are working on mobile every day. Curated by Derek Allard. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.

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When the iPhone came out in 2007, the demonstration of its web browser by the late great Steve Jobs gave the not-so-subtle impression that Apple wasn’t too perturbed about its users pinching to zoom and swiping to scroll as part of the browsing experience. Responsive web design aimed to solve this problem by smartly applying flexible grids, fluid layouts and, of course, media queries.

However, responsive web design has turned out to be somewhat of a case study in the law of unintended consequences, with one of the perverse unanticipated effects being breakpoint paranoia. But even without the undue influence that media queries exerts on your selection of these breakpoints, it dawns on you after much introspection that these might not be the droids we’re looking for.

There are many strategies to choose from when developing a modern, device independent website nowadays. How should capabilities of the device or browser be determined? Should the presentation logic be server side or client side? Traditionally, mobile optimization had to happen server side.

Over the last couple of years, Responsive Web Design and tools like Modernizr have become very popular. Recently, combination techniques (often called RESS), where optimization is done both server-side and client-side, has become a trend. The recently launched WURFL.js tool, fits into this category.

No one really wants to be interrupted, much less for something silly while they’re in the middle of doing a billion things. So, why do app ratings follow this pattern? And why don’t developers attempt to talk more with their customers?

In this article, we’ll investigate the various tactics of prompting for app reviews and ratings and how to make them better. We’ll also talk about how to ask users for feedback in a way that benefits everyone.

When interacting with mobile devices, users have little patience for confusing interfaces or unnecessary steps that impede their progress. As designers, we must understand the role of momentum in effective user interface design and create experiences that keep our users moving forward.

Think about the act of checking email on a mobile device. This is probably one of our most efficient interactions with our phones; we do it while crossing the street, between conversations and even (for the dangerous few!) while driving. Every distracting bit of user interface (UI) that could get in the way of checking our email has been stripped from the design, making it a streamlined process that we love doing.

The mobile web is a harsh environment: mobile processors are slower than their desktop counterparts; network connectivity is flaky; bandwidth is low; latency is high; and touchscreen keyboards are slow. The best mobile web applications are the ones that excel at handling these challenges.

In this article, we'll look at how to identify the tasks your users want to accomplish on a mobile device, memorize as much as you can about your users’ situation, presume that your users’ actions will succeed (and get them to their next task) and also how to predict your users’ next actions, and prepare accordingly.

To prepare for a talk about the changing roles of designers and developers, given at HOW Interactive a few months back, I interviewed 20+ web shops. Validated by my own experience, I found that many of them faced challenges fitting responsive design into their workflow, and the role of most web designers had changed to include coding in some form or another.

At least half of the designers knew HTML and CSS well but wanted a more visual way to get at it. Well, a new generation of visual responsive design tools has arrived. These responsive design tools are for anyone who understands HTML and CSS (or is willing to learn) and wants to visually design a responsive website — and have code to show for it.

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